Harry Robinson

Howdy. The name is Harry Robinson and I'm new to this. I live in the beautiful city of Burlington, Vermont on the banks of Lake Champlain. New-York State is on the other side of the lake. I am currently retired and I am learning how to program in C and in TCL also. I find TCL much simpler than C! Come one come all visit Burlington. It's a beautiful city!

I have done some work for Habitat for Humanity, I got to make a lot of travels abroad and got to meet a lot of very poor people; I then realized how much our kids don't realize how lucky and blessed they are. You might consider coming to give us a hand at Habitat. Thanks!

Technical questions

The home key and the overwrite mode

I find a sort of bug strangely in all TCL applications. We hit "Home" and instead of returning to the first word of the same line it returns to the beginning of the paragraph. Can this be fixed? -- check out Move cursor by display line in a text widget; LES.

I also notice the insert button does not give crush (whatever this function is called. It writes over a text and does not insert). Can this also be fixed?

Thanks!

DKF: We don't currently support an overwrite mode for either entry or text, at least in part because a number of us find it more annoying than useful. :^) (Many other applications use this approach as well, for example Mozilla.) OTOH, it could be added. We'd need to add a flag to the widget (easy), a few bindings to do the work (slightly harder), and a good way of indicating what mode we're in (awkward, and not done by many other apps, for example IE, which leads to people being unsure what happens when they press a letter). There are also a few more formal requirements to make it happen (docs, tests, and a small TIP) but they should be relatively straight forward.

Harry Robinson Howdy and thanks so much Mister DFK. "Overwrite" is the term indeed. And also many thanks to Mister LES for his link. Thanks to both. (May 27 2004)

Restoring the position of the cursor on the initial page

Harry Robinson Another question concerning the position of the cursor. I have noticed that on many TCL apps when I go from page A to page B and then I return to A, I don't return to the point where I have left off but to the top of the page. That is if I am on the bottom of page A then I go to B and I return to A I'll return to the top of the page and not the bottom. This is annoying since I have to return to the bottom using the mouse or the cursor. Can this problem be fixed or is this a problem inherent to all TCL apps? Again thanks for your kindness.

FW: I'm gonna guess the program you're using is loading data into a text widget, with some kind of real-time history, browser-style, to allow for e.g. a "back" button. In which case all you'd have to do is record the scroll position into a list every time someone leaves a page (with [$scrollbar get]), and then when it's restored reset that scroll point. Could be as few as 3 lines of additional code.

Harry Robinson: Thanks FW for a great explanation! I have the utmost admiration and respect for all of you. You are all TCL experts! And this TCL programming language has been devised so smartly, it is just amazing. Even an old brain like mine can understand how it works! :-)

Please JC, leave for 3 or 4 days (until 25 November 2004 for Mister Robinson does not seem to come here often. Also there is no way to contact him since he did not leave his e-mail

Mister Robinson, In They help tclers to travel you invited everyone to your farm in Burlington, Vermont. You said "come one come all to my farm". Your invitation somehow got deleted. My invitation also got deleted. Well.. I guess someone believes we wouldn't make good hosts!

I like Burlington and I'll be travelling with my family around the area at the end of December. Does your "come one come all" invitation still hold? If yes I'd be delighted to go pay you a visit. Please confirm at: [email protected] Thanks! -- unperson

PS: In the meantime I'll extend an invitation to your family and yourself to "come one come all" to Montreal. :-)